Hacker News Reader

Comment by elamje | Hacker News Reader

“Generate Hacker News Comments from Titles” yields

- A nice little hack and I think it would be better to have a bit more info on the title. It would show a much more comprehensive description and a little more info on the actual title.

- I don't know enough about this topic, but it makes me wonder why it's so popular in some other forum. It appears there is a lot of noise in the community, so why not just show up at the bottom of the page, or go to the top of HN, rather than showing up, to get to the bottom of the page?

- I find the title on the front page to be a bit clumsy. Maybe a change to "HN News." might help somewhat, I suppose. EDIT: The title is a bit misleading. Is this some kind of a "submitter" with pg saying "Show HN" because of some sort of 'Show HN'?

These are actually believable

View on HN

Lot of noise though, we are far from passing the Turing test in most case but still fun:

>Nice idea from a hacker perspective. I'd like to point out the following two issues

- Your results for your comments seem a hell of a lot to me, for example, but not the comments that you linked to.

- Your results for comments in particular appear in the top left of the comments. But the comments appear on the right of the comments.

- You need to be looking at what your titles are up to and what you are actually looking at and how other titles are. I have to click through the comment page to get to the first page.

I just tried it and it works.

> we are far from passing the Turing test

I'd propose it's an unproven theory that comment sources other than this software would pass the Turing test.

These sound like actual comments from people with an incoherent train of thought, which might be plenty of people on the internet. These are scary accurate. I wonder how easy it would be to write a bot to, for example, post on Reddit and gain karma for the purposes of trusted-account generation. It seems like most of those account farms rely on self-upvoting which can be caught easily by the site. Posting potentially good comments that get upvoted by real people would be pretty hard to counter.

Who has ever looked at a reddit profile and decided that an account should be trusted based on karma? Recent few comments are way more likely to determine trustworthiness.

Hoarding karma on reddit is as useless as hoarding karma on HN. I've deleted the only reddit profile I've ever had a few days ago with about 45k karma. If they had any value, I would maybe keep it and just stop posting.

> Who has ever looked at a reddit profile and decided that an account should be trusted based on karma?

For starters, automated subreddit spam protection algorithms. You may have misinterpreted me, think of it like StackOverflow karma. Your account needs a certain amount before it can do certain things.

Yes, maybe like +200 (which is what I've set it at as a mod in severe cases of brigading), not thousands. Most of the subreddits don't require anything but positive karma, and you can achieve that with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new bots make.

There are no subreddits with a spam algorithm counted in the thousands of karma, that would prevent them from growing.

In the black market of reddit accounts, age and karma are the two main selling points.

> with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new bots make.

As I said in my other comment, these self-upvoting schemes are very easy to detect and are not a scalable way to create tens of thousands of bots.

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